Nanosheets Enable 5nm Transistor Technology

It was less than a year ago that we covered Nanowires Enable FinFET Successor which looked at the use of Nanowires to create transistors and improve on FinFET technology which had become the primary transistor construction technology for complex semiconductors. This was using 8nm Nanowires and was expected to be the next generation of transistor technology.

Now IBM have announced a new breakthrough using Nanosheets to create 5nm transistors. And this is likely to completely take over the role that Nanowires were expected to fulfill. Here is how they did it.

The primary breakthrough is to take the vertical fins of the FinFET and turn them into horizontal Nanosheets as shown below.

5nm stacked Nanosheet transistor structure

And a photograph looks like this.

Nanosheet Transistor

For a more complete description of the technology, this video covers some of the details on why this will lead to a scalable production process.